Nicholas Kristof: We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children

The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy. And in this test, we in the West are not doing well.

The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin soon suggests that Palestinian children are lesser victims, devalued by their association with Hamas and its history of terrorism. Consider that more than 1,500 children in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and around one-third of Gaza homes have been destroyed or damaged in just two weeks — and this is merely the softening-up before what is expected to be a much bloodier ground invasion.

I’ve flown into beautiful, sun-washed Tel Aviv, where the graffiti reads “Destroy Hamas.” Israelis have been shattered by the Hamas terrorism and kidnappings, an attack that felt existential and explains the determination to dismantle Hamas, whatever the cost. The anxiety in Tel Aviv is palpable, peaceful though it seems, while Gaza is an inner ring of hell and probably on a path to something much worse.

The United States speaks a good deal about principles, but I fear that President Biden has embedded a hierarchy of human life in official American policy. He expressed outrage at the massacres of Jews by Hamas, as he should have, but he has struggled to be equally clear about valuing Gazan lives. And it’s not always evident whether he is standing four-square with Israel as a country or with its failed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime obstacle to peace.

Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.”

I think that view reflects a practical and moral miscalculation. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/opinion/israel-gaza-palestine-children.html

Josh Rogin: Putin is helping Hamas to hurt the West

When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he said Russia was trying “to help normalize the situation” in the Gaza Strip, according to the Kremlin. But Moscow has little interest in helping Israel. Russia is on the side of Hamas and its patron, Iran — in part to undermine the United States and its allies.

The timing of the attack could not have been better for Putin, who coincidentally was celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and slaughtered more the 1,300 civilians. Russia’s main foreign policy goal right now is to distract the world from its ongoing invasion and atrocities in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow is pushing for an end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which is hanging by a thin thread in Congress. The crisis in Israel aids these efforts. Moscow’s interest is in stoking it, not solving it.

While there is no clear evidence that Russian leaders knew about the Hamas attacks in advance, the Kremlin is working hard to take advantage. Russia has stepped up its support for Hamas diplomatically and in the propaganda war; it’s also seizing the opportunity to ramp up its violence in Ukraine while the world is distracted. On Oct. 8, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka praised Russia’s assistance in an interview with Russia Today, a state-controlled media outlet.

“There are countries that support us politically. Even Russia sympathizes with us,” he said. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/17/russia-israel-putin-hamas-gaza/

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor: Israel’s bombing of Gaza undercuts the West’s Ukraine moralism

On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more-than 2 million people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech, Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.

But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war, principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/23/israel-west-moralism-hypocrisy-veto/

Zachary Cohen and Marshall Cohen: Back-to-back plea deals pose grave legal threat to Donald Trump

Two stalwart allies of former President Donald Trump flipped against him this week, a staggering turn of events that could now pose a grave threat to his ability to fend off criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The rapid-fire developments are a massive boost for prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, and the separate but overlapping federal case against Trump that was filed by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

The pleas are a stark display of the reality that the Georgia case against Trump and his co-defendants is getting stronger. While Trump has vowed to fight until the bitter end, these newly inked plea deals force his co-defendants to confront the same difficult choice: cut a deal or roll the dice at trial.

For two prominent Trump co-defendants – Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro – the looming five-month trial, potentially resulting in a yearslong prison sentence, appears to have spurred them into flipping.

Their decisions to transform from Trump diehards to key witness against him have likely shattered any sense of invincibility that the former president or others charged may be feeling – perhaps for the first time. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/21/politics/:chesebro-powell-plea-deals-trump-takeaways/index.html

Jonah Shepp: Don’t Blame Gazans for Hamas

What feels different about this war is that Israel’s leaders are unusually willing to make the implicit explicit and acknowledge that, yes, they are punishing Gazans for Hamas’ crimes. When defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “full siege” on Gaza on October 9, cutting off water, fuel, and electricity, he said: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Energy minister Israel Katz then responded to international calls for aid by saying there would be no lifting of the siege until Hamas released the hostages it had taken. Israel later backed down on the siege to a degree, following pressure from President Biden, but the damage to Israel’s moral standing was done.

These are not the actions of a government overly concerned with distinguishing civilians from military targets. Given the country’s rightward drift and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist governing coalition, perhaps that’s not surprising. But this disturbing rhetorical turn merits examination, and it is important to understand why it is wrong.

If the war leads to both Hamas and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition losing popular legitimacy and exiting the scene, it would be a silver lining to a very dark cloud since neither Israelis nor Palestinians deserve the mediocre leadership they’ve been saddled with. But at least the Israelis have some power to change that if they want to. The people of Gaza do not. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/dont-blame-gazans-for-hamas.html

Jonathan Martin: Why the GOP Can’t Unite

It’s the same reason there are effectively parallel GOP presidential primaries. One is between a series of candidates embarked on all the usual rituals vying for support from about half the party’s voters, while the other half has long ago made up its mind about who its preferred nominee is. His name may ring a bell.

There is no longer a cohesive Republican Party. There’s a pre-Trump GOP and a post-Trump GOP, living together uneasily. They may be roommates but they’re not married. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/18/gop-party-house-speaker-00122371

Andrew Sullivan:A Party Unfit For Government

I know you know this, but it’s still vital to remember that a major political party is backing this incoherent, unhinged, fact-free narcissist to be president of the United States. It is therefore no surprise to discover that the same party is completely incapable of forming a stable majority in the House of Representatives because it too is incoherent, divided, unhinged, and narcissistic.

We’ve never had this amount of time without a Speaker in the history of the House. But then we’ve never had a majority party as utterly vacuous as this one. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-party-unfit-for-government-875

Jonathan Chait: It Turns Out Joe Biden Is Actually In Charge of the Biden Administration

Graeme Wood: What Is Israel Trying to Accomplish

Israel’s invasion of Gaza awaits the parting of clouds. Clear skies favor Israel, which dominates
the airspace and wants to be able to look down to see what awaits its ground forces. Early morning yesterday brought rain, and at dawn, orange cumulus clouds rolled over the Mediterranean. Today’s forecast calls for more rain, and therefore probably another day without Israeli infantry in Gaza. Rarely has the Weather Channel been such ominous and thrilling viewing.

Gazans are waiting for the clouds to part, too. What will happen immediately after they do is not a mystery to them or anyone else. Israel will go in hard; it will lose many soldiers; Hamas will lose many fighters; and many civilians who stayed behind will die. Israel has long claimed, with some moral and legal justification, that any fighter who uses a human shield is responsible for that civilian’s fate. But the civilians stick around and take their chances with Hamas because Israeli officials have led them to wonder whether, if they left, they could ever come back. Intolerant rhetoric has consequences, and one of them is that Israel’s vengeance will be messier and more miserable for all involved than it needs to be. That, also, is a heavy moral burden. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-gaza-hamas-evacuation/675665/

Eric Levitz: The Undisputed Facts in Gaza Are Enough

Virtually every war entails some number of civilian casualties. But in its previous campaigns against Gaza, Israel has shown a distinctive indifference toward civilian life. The IDF will attribute this reality to Hamas’s habit of embedding its military installations into civilian infrastructure. But it does not follow that Israel has no responsibility to give weight to Palestinian life.

More fundamentally, Israel wields de facto control over Gazans’ conditions of daily life. In a meaningful sense, Israel is the state that rules them. And Gazans are denied a voice in that state on the basis of their national and ethnic identities. It is true that, in surveys, Gazans express little interest in living in a single, binational democratic state from the river to the sea. But it is unclear whether this would be the case in a world where such a state were not such a far-fetched hypothetical. In any event, the fact that Gazans live under the subjugation of the Israeli state, rather than under the auspices of their own independent state, makes Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza all the more obscene.

Meanwhile, it is far from clear that the present campaign will be effective in ensuring Israelis’ long-term security interests. Already, the campaign has generated such enmity in the Arab world as to jeopardize Israel’s normalized relations with its neighbors. At the same time, the unprecedented scale of death within Gaza is all but certain to radicalize countless young people, minting the next generation of violent extremists.

Israel cannot tolerate Hamas attacks. But it is not clear that it couldn’t more effectively protect Israelis by simultaneously increasing its defensive capacities on the Gaza border, targeting some high-ranking Hamas militants, and addressing the Palestinians’ political grievances. For example, by abandoning its illegal settlement project in the West Bank, Israel could free up more troops for guarding its border with Hamas. At the same time, an Israeli government that made genuine concessions to Palestinian rights might eat into Hamas’s appeal in Gaza. Among the other merits of this approach, it seems likelier to bring about the safe return of the Israeli hostages still living in Gaza.

For all these reasons, the case for an immediate ceasefire — and durable end to a mode of warfare that takes mass Palestinian death as its acceptable price — is strong. And the question of whether Israel was responsible for the calamity at al-Ahli Hospital has essentially no bearing on that case. There is simply no reason for advocates of the Palestinian cause to dig in on a factual debate about a single incident, rather than focusing on making their moral case against the present war.

Thus, it is not just irresponsible but also bad political practice, to wager one’s credibility on disputed, inessential details. The case against Israel’s campaign does not rest on its culpability for any single explosion, and the Palestinians’ allies do them no favors by acting as though it does. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/the-undisputed-facts-in-gaza-are-enough.html

Sarah Jones: The Palestinian Blood on America’s Hands

As Israel threatens a ground invasion of Gaza, U.S. officials have reportedly begun to urge restraint, at least in private. It comes too late for the more than 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza who have already been killed by Israeli air strikes and the roughly 1 million who have been displaced. On Monday, a human-rights organization estimated that Israeli forces have killed more than a thousand children in Gaza since October 7. Israeli air strikes in Gaza and southern Lebanon have killed aid workers, medical personnel, and journalists like Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah. On Tuesday night, an explosion rocked a hospital in Gaza City, which is said to have killed hundreds of people seeking care and refuge. Hamas blames the Israel Defense Forces, which recently ordered Gazan hospitals to evacuate and have attacked hospitals there in the past. The IDF and the United States say it was caused by an errant militant rocket.

Without some kind of cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, many more Palestinians will die, and the vast majority of them will lose their lives and limbs to bombs and bullets supplied by the U.S. Whatever U.S. officials tell their Israeli counterparts about restraint in private, the public message has hardly changed. In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, President Biden said the U.S. would, as usual, provide Israel with “everything they need.”

“Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust,” he added, and Israel must respond. “The Israelis are gonna do everything in their power to avoid the killing of innocent civilians,” he asserted. If that’s true, Israel’s mighty military is either powerless or its leaders don’t believe civilians in Gaza are innocent. The thousands killed by Israeli air strikes did not bear collective responsibility for Hamas or its slaughter. The dead are not served by lies. Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve more than platitudes, more than U.S. policy as usual. But Biden’s statements are in keeping with overwhelming American support for an apartheid state. Today, the U.S. supports Benjamin Netanyahu’s incompetent far-right government, which seems to have no strategy but to answer indiscriminate brutality with even more indiscriminate brutality. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/palestinian-blood-is-on-american-hands-in-israel-hamas-war.html

Dana Milbank: Stonewall Jordan marches Republicans into the wilderness

Fortunately, on Tuesday, 20 courageous Republicans stood in the breach and blocked Jordan’s terrorist takeover of the speaker’s gavel. But this also means that 200 House Republicans — including all members of GOP leadership and several self-styled moderates — voted for an extremist takeover of their majority. This was no aberration: The next day, 199 of them did it again in a second vote.

It’s no longer a matter of the Republican establishment being disrupted by fanatics. As this week’s votes show, the fanatics now are the establishment. It was the equivalent of 90 percent of House Democrats nominating Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib to be speaker — except no member of “the Squad” ever fomented an attack on the Capitol.

On Thursday, Jordan called off what would have been a third failed vote on the House floor. Instead, he backed a plan to expand the powers of the temporary speaker, Patrick McHenry (N.C.), to allow the House to function for the next three months — while Jordan would spend that time putting thumbscrews to the holdouts.

This caused the Republican caucus, meeting once more in the Capitol basement, to erupt in furor.

Jordan’s foes didn’t want him to remain as the speaker nominee. And Jordan’s hard-line supporters didn’t want to reopen the House.

The confusion is so deep that even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) is starting to make sense. Congresswoman Jewish Space Lasers left a GOP caucus meeting early this week, telling a group of us that it was “a venting session” with “mostly a lot of arguing” and “just airing grievances” — much like “every single meeting” lately.

This was true enough. At the conference meeting Greene left, Rep. Victoria Spartz (Ind.), known for constantly changing her positions and making bizarre threats, reportedly broke into tears as she delivered an incomprehensible speech to her colleagues. “I’ve never wasted so much time, said Greene. “Even on vacation, I’m busier.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/19/republican-civil-war-house-gop-jim-jordan-speaker-fight/